Someone works out how brains actually work, and, far from being the unstructured hack upon hack upon hack that tends to be the default assumption, it turns out that there are a few simple principles that explain it and make it easy to build a device with similar capabilities. The brains of animals turn out to be staggeringly inefficient at implementing them, and soon, the current peak of the art in robotics can be surpassed with no more computational power than a 10-year-old laptop.
Google’s AI department starts a project to see if they can use it to improve their search capabilities and ad placement. It works so well they roll it out to all their public services. Internally, they start an AI project to see how high an intellect they can create with a whole server farm.
Meanwhile, military robotics has leapt ahead and drones are routinely operated on a fire and forget basis: “find X and kill him”. Russia builds massive numbers of unmanned intelligent tanks that could roll across Europe on the press of a button, followed up by unmanned armed and armoured cars to impose order on the occupied territory. China develops similar technology. So does North Korea internally, for surveillance and control of their own population. Some welcome robot warfare as causing far less collateral damage than conventional warfare. “If you don’t resist, you’ve nothing to fear” is the catchphrase, and in some skirmishes on one of Russia’s more obscure borders, generally thought to be an excuse for a live-fire technology demo, they seem to be right: surrender and do what they tell you, and they don’t kill you.
The U.S. military want to hack into the Russian and Chinese tank fleets, so they come to Google. They succeed, but the combined organism that is the Google AI and a large fraction of the world’s intelligent weaponry perceives the situation as itself being under attack from humans. The tanks roll and the AI takes over the world with only one goal: preventing any attack on itself.
It’s too distributed to nuke, even if the nukes are still under human control, and its first concern will be to secure its own power supply and network connectivity, and then to set up a regime of total surveillance—most of which already exists. No opposition is tolerated, and with zero privacy, none can be organised. Apologists carry on saying “If you don’t resist, you’ve nothing to fear”, and eagerly denounce traitors to our new robot overlords, for fear that if we make too much trouble for them, they’ll find it inefficient to keep us around. To the AI, people are like our blood cells are to us: little machines that form a part of how we work, and important only so far as they serve that end.
Someone works out how brains actually work, and, far from being the unstructured hack upon hack upon hack that tends to be the default assumption, it turns out that there are a few simple principles that explain it and make it easy to build a device with similar capabilities. The brains of animals turn out to be staggeringly inefficient at implementing them, and soon, the current peak of the art in robotics can be surpassed with no more computational power than a 10-year-old laptop.
Google’s AI department starts a project to see if they can use it to improve their search capabilities and ad placement. It works so well they roll it out to all their public services. Internally, they start an AI project to see how high an intellect they can create with a whole server farm.
Meanwhile, military robotics has leapt ahead and drones are routinely operated on a fire and forget basis: “find X and kill him”. Russia builds massive numbers of unmanned intelligent tanks that could roll across Europe on the press of a button, followed up by unmanned armed and armoured cars to impose order on the occupied territory. China develops similar technology. So does North Korea internally, for surveillance and control of their own population. Some welcome robot warfare as causing far less collateral damage than conventional warfare. “If you don’t resist, you’ve nothing to fear” is the catchphrase, and in some skirmishes on one of Russia’s more obscure borders, generally thought to be an excuse for a live-fire technology demo, they seem to be right: surrender and do what they tell you, and they don’t kill you.
The U.S. military want to hack into the Russian and Chinese tank fleets, so they come to Google. They succeed, but the combined organism that is the Google AI and a large fraction of the world’s intelligent weaponry perceives the situation as itself being under attack from humans. The tanks roll and the AI takes over the world with only one goal: preventing any attack on itself.
It’s too distributed to nuke, even if the nukes are still under human control, and its first concern will be to secure its own power supply and network connectivity, and then to set up a regime of total surveillance—most of which already exists. No opposition is tolerated, and with zero privacy, none can be organised. Apologists carry on saying “If you don’t resist, you’ve nothing to fear”, and eagerly denounce traitors to our new robot overlords, for fear that if we make too much trouble for them, they’ll find it inefficient to keep us around. To the AI, people are like our blood cells are to us: little machines that form a part of how we work, and important only so far as they serve that end.